After asking this question at indie hackers, I would like to know if anyone over here would like to share recent lessons from failures.
Let's celebrate failures & grow.
Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
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Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#2Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile.
After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production database from my own dev machine.
All in all, this was a good learning experience.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#3I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression.
The growth is realizing that sometimes variance in the data means that really cool model/code you want to write isn't useful, and there's always a trade-off between elegance and utility (if the two aren't in fact opposites)
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#4I once put adding the recipients for an email to the wrong loop which meant if you were the last user in the database you would receive the email 10.000 times if there were 10.000 users. If you were the user before 9999 times etc.. only the first user that signed up received it once (my test account). So I only found out when the client called me that all their mandrill credits had ran out in a few seconds.
In startup failures: didn’t listen to my gut feeling and let my cofounder pile on more features and quibble about the design for a year before validating a single feature with a potential customer. We didn’t make it with that one...
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#5I failed to start a business that would provide reliable income post-military enlistment. I tried for maybe six good years a few ideas: investing in real estate, running facebook ads for business, and building routers were some of my best projects with foreseeable upside and a runway towards sustainability. I failed to focus on just one or two core products and this - combined with my active duty work schedule- really made it difficult to see each project through the tough parts.
Its not a total failure; I have a steady career with great benefits that I can retire from in ten more years (total of 20) with a pension. I've learned to focus on my core competencies which has of course catapulted my progress in the selected field. I miss my side projects but I know now that I really can't do everything at once.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#6Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile. After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production d…
I hope you also periodically validate your backups with restoration as well - A backup is only good if it can be restored.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#7I couldn't think of something to write here. That was probably the most recent one. I have lots of others, though.
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#8Oh sweet sweet failures!
I'll start.
I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man.
This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) for stupid silly things.
Problem is the alcohol made my jealousy amplified by 100x (wish it would do the same with my startup revenue)and I would flip out for nothing.
Two weeks ago I promised to my gf and to myself that I would have stopped with this behavior and that I would have drunk less.
No need to say, that same night, I drank waay too much and flipped out because she just glanced at another guy and made her cry and leave me there all alone, drunk and stupid. She couldn't take it anymore.
Fortunately, the day after we talked about it and I decided to quit drinking cold turkey (Allen Carr's book helped a lot in this- suggested if you're in the same boat).
It has been 10 days and I haven't touched a drop of alcohol nor I intend to.
Working on my insecurity/jealousy as well.
Your turn!
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#9I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression. The growth is realizing that sometimes variance in the data means that really cool model/code you want to write isn't useful, and there's always a trade-off between elegance and utility (if the two aren't in fact opposites)
Wow that's harsh! How did you feel when you realized it?
Re: Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?
#10Oh sweet sweet failures! I'll start. I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man. This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) f…
Please just drink it out tonight.a glass of wine instead if jealousy